Autoblogging is the process of automating blog’s for your business, while some in the industry make be critical of the process there are actually a number of cases where autoblogging makes perfect sense such as a news relay services, real estate agents or even recipe or automotive websites. At it’s most basic level, autoblogging is about taking common repetitive tasks and making them easier for website owners.
For example, a real estate website could automatically pull postings from their local MLS listing service and create effective web posts on a realtors blog about each properly by listing information and pictures for visitors, this type of auto blogging is fairly common in the industry and saves agents countless hours of copy and pasting listing details from other websites.
Let’s take a look at how to run an effective auto blogging package, it takes a little experience and technical knowledge but these may be easily overcome by hiring web professionals such as myself for the more complicated parts of the process.
Install WordPress
Step one of course is to install WordPress, a great and flexible blogging package which happens to be free. You can download WordPress directly and install it on your web host of if you’re less technical you can setup your hosting with BlueHost and use their automated process to easily install WordPress with a quick click of your mouse.
Install Appropriate Plugins
Plugins are add ons to WordPress, they’re like super powered steroids that make WordPress do extra stuff. In this case, you’ll need to download and install FeedWordPress to make WordPress import RSS feeds from around the Internet.
What’s an RSS feed? Well simply put, it’s geek speak. RSS feeds are used to let one computer or software program talk to another, basically it’s a specially formated file that tells one website about the content of another website. You’ll need to use it to automatically pull content from one website to display on other.
Now, to make sure you’re really cutting down on your workload, there are a few more plugins that you’ll need. See, FeedWordPress will fetch thousands of posts … some are duplicates and many need proper keywords etc. so lets add a couple awesome plugins to make your life a little easier.
WP Auto Tagger will add keywords to each post automatically, this helps cut down the work you’ll have to do to each post.
Delete Duplicate Posts is a quick way to make sure you don’t have duplicate posts in your database.
Setup Your Feeds
Now that you have your blog setup and running, you’ll need to add feeds from popular sources to automatically populate your blog. For example, you may wish to add a feed from Google for blog posts featuring my name. To do this, let’s search Google Blog for Christopher Ross and take a look at the results. On the left hand column, we see a link for RSS. This link offers us the ability to copy and paste the link http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&client=safari&oe=UTF-8&um=1&q=%22Christopher+Ross%22&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss into FeedWordPress. Once this is done, your website will scan the blogshere on a schedule, looking for all new posts about Christopher Ross. You can do the same with Google News, to ensure you always know what’s happening.
Manage Posts
When you setup FeedWordPress it asks if you’d like posts to be held for moderation or posted, it’s best to always hold posts for moderation while you’re getting used to the system and make notes of things you need to delete or edit before they go live.
Advance WordPress users will also be able to build special functions into their websites to automate complex parts of the process. For example, I use the CRON services on BlueHost to automatically run a series of scripts on many websites, which scans newly added posts for content, URL’s and items to skip or delete. If you don’t have access to CRON services, the WordPress plugin U-Cron will do a similar service for you.
Common Corrections
My scripts for example, run a simple WordPress function every 15 minutes:
[source lang="php"]$wpdb->query("UPDATE `www_greatchefs_com`.`wp_posts` SET `post_date` = ‘".date(‘Y-m-d H:i:s’)."’,
`post_date_gmt` = ‘".date(‘Y-m-d H:i:s’)."’,
`post_modified` = ‘".date(‘Y-m-d H:i:s’)."’,
`post_modified_gmt` = ‘".date(‘Y-m-d H:i:s’)."’ WHERE `post_date` < ‘2000-01-01 00:00:00′;
");
[/source]
This simple script scans the WordPress database for any post with a date prior to January 1st, 2000 and automatically changes it to the current date. This saves me hours of manually updating posts and makes posting to client websites dramatically faster.
After my scripts have tested for and corrected the majority of minor, common issues I automatically move the post from Pending to Draft which indicates the post is ready for me to review and if I want, post it live.
Approval
The final step of auto blogging and one that I believe is often overlooked is the final approval of an article. Personally, I believe it is critical that people (not machines) do a final scan of each article being posted and ensure it is accurate, maybe this isn’t true auto blogging but it’s impossible for robots to ensure everything is right so a quick scan of the article will ensure that you’re sharing the right information with your target audience.
Who is Auto Blogging Right For?
There are a lot of industries that autoblogging simply wouldn’t work for. For example, I would never want to automate my website here to scan for WordPress articles but I do believe that scanning trusted data sources and automatically processing listings for car dealerships, financial reports, real estate, news services, syndicated news etc. is a wonderful use of RSS and auto blogging technology.
Shameless self promotion – If you’re thinking about automating your online presence, why not give me a call or drop me an email and I can help you make the best choices for your blog.
